Daily Archives: 23/06/2016

In order to prepare food in a kitchen safely and without any health risk, teenagers need what we may call “Kitchen Skills”. Skills relating to the practical realities of preparing hot and cold food.

With this in mind SEN Press has devised the ‘Simple Meals’ pack which contains a series of simple narratives exploring the different situations in which young people may be required to put their kitchen skills to the test.

The Simple Meals Value Pack, which supports the ASDAN Transition Challenge and Towards Independence Life Skills courses, is suitable for students aged between 14 and 19 with SEN and a reading age of around seven.

Within the pack there are four story books: “Breakfast in Bed”, “Lunch for Guests”, “Packed Lunch”, and “Tea”. Each contains descriptions of everyday situations in which young people have to prepare simple meals themselves.

Also included is a CD-ROM providing electronic versions of each title, making it ideal for interactive whiteboard presentations and for students who would also benefit from listening to the text.

It is also possible to edit and save the text to make your own story, create differentiated texts, and personalise the text with your students’ names to enhance engagement.

Additionally an extensive range of activity worksheets and interactive activities is included. These look more closely at practical skills and safety issues and include Words & Pictures, Picture Search, Keyword Flashcards, Wordsearch, Spot the Difference, and How Well Did You Read?

Supporting resources for teachers including page-by-page notes for all the stories and assessment resources (feedback sheets and student record sheets) are also included in the pack.

The complete set of resources containing two copies of each of the six readers, the complete teacher book of notes and worksheets, and the CD Rom is available for £99 plus VAT. Individual elements from the pack are also available separately.

You can find more information and see sample pages from the readers, and details for ordering individual items as well as the full Value Pack, on our ‘Simple Meals’ web page.

If you have any questions or need more information, please email info@senpress.co.uk or call 01582 833205. We’ll be delighted to hear from you.

Five years ago the Coalition government claimed that through some fairly simple changes the average secondary school could save £100,000 a year, while the average primary school could save £25,000 a year.

Many people were a little doubtful, but we waited… and waited… for the Department for Education to come back and tell us all what had actually been achieved as a result of this initiative.

This year they have launched the Schools financial health and efficiency collection.

This programme doesn’t seem to report on whether the savings proclaimed five years ago have been achieved, nor really explore what has happened in the past five years.

So, as part of School Business, Management and Administration Week (which will take place early next term), we are trying to fill in the gaps by researching what is happening in terms of efficiency and money-saving planning in schools.

I’d be really grateful if you could spend a moment (it absolutely won’t take more than three minutes) answering our questionnaire – whether or not you or your colleagues have spent time thinking about ways of saving money or otherwise making the school more efficient.

There are only six questions on our questionnaire, but it really will help everyone understand how people like you, working in a school, feel about the issue of whether schools can be made more efficient and effective.

Or whether schools are already doing all that they can to balance budgets while maintaining the quality of teaching and learning.

We sent out some information to you via post regarding the servicing and maintenance of the natural ventilation systems and
that are located in your school. We are following up to see if our services could be of any use to you.

We offer a full clean and service of your natural ventilation systems and/or toilet ventilation through one-off or 5 year contracts.

It was, I must admit, more than a little worrying to see an article in the TES this month which suggests that increasing numbers of teachers are becoming sceptical about the benefits of play when it comes to ensuring that children become learners for life.

Of course not all play is equally valuable, but there surely is no doubt that the most effective type of play is co-operative play.

Because we value positive play so strongly we have created a whole new section of our website which deals with a huge array of positive play activities.

Indeed one of the benefits of this type of play is that it can help new members of the school become integrated both into the social life of the school and into the notion of co-operation as a fundamental part of school life.

From Jamanga to Parachutes there is a whole range of games that enhance social skills and enhance children’s physical and mental development

You can see the whole range of our co-operative play games in our online catalogue

And, as always, you can place an order with Edventure in a variety of ways, including:

An article in The Guardian outlines four ways in which your students should change how they revise to improve their revision success and exam performance. These are… 1) Test, don’t recognise, 2) Space, don’t cram, 3) Effort, not flow, and 4) Practise output, not input.

I am particularly interested in “Test, don’t recognise” and “Practise output, not input” because these are things that Education Quizzes (which is free for a whole year) can help your students with:

1. Test, don’t recognise

“The most common form of study is the one that gives “revision” its name – literally just looking at the thing you want to learn again. The problem with this is that we mistake our ability to recognise something for an ability to recall it.”

“Recognition and recall are different psychological processes.”

4. Practise output, not input

“While it may feel good to get completely familiar with the material before practising writing answers, it omits from our study practice the exact skill we are marked on…. For any test, we need to rehearse exactly the thing we’ll be required to do.”

Which is what makes using Education Quizzes as a revision tool so effective. And there may still be time to share Education Quizzes with your GCSE students (depending on the exam board) for some effective last minute revision.

What’s more, as our Education Quizzes can be accessed by students on their laptops, tablets and smartphones, your students can make the most of their study leave with the ability to revise anytime, anywhere.

If. however, your GCSE students have already taken their GCSE RE exam, you can still use Education Quizzes with your Key Stage 3 students and prospective GCSE students for RE revision throughout the year and in the lead up to future examinations.

To see our full range of RE Education Quizzes for KS3, click here.
And to see our full range of RE Education Quizzes for GCSE, click here.